01. A SOC lead is reviewing a proposed SOAR playbook that will automatically disable any identity whenever an XDR detection fires, regardless of confidence level. Analysts note that several recent detections at this confidence tier were false positives affecting executives and production service accounts.
What is the strongest reason to add a human-approval gate before the auto-disable action?
a) Disabling identities is a reporting activity, and reporting always requires sign-off.
b) High blast radius combined with a high false-positive rate makes unattended disabling too risky here.
c) Human approval will make the playbook run faster than a fully automated flow.
d) Automation is inherently unreliable, so no containment action of any kind should ever be automated by a playbook.
02. Telemetry shows that a valid user session token was stolen and is being replayed from an unfamiliar geography while the legitimate user is still working normally from their usual location. Reimaging the user's device would not help, because the credential itself is compromised.
Which containment action most directly addresses this finding?
a) Quarantine the user's laptop, since endpoint isolation stops all attacker activity.
b) Roll out a new antivirus signature across all endpoints to detect and remove the token-theft malware.
c) Revoke the active session and force re-authentication to invalidate the stolen token.
d) Add the user's home IP address to a block list at the perimeter firewall.
03. An endpoint inside a zero-trust segment begins beaconing to a known command-and-control address. The SOC has confirmed the compromise and must now work through the response lifecycle of contain, report, remediate, and reinstantiate.
Which action should the team take first?
a) Open an incident report and notify the stakeholders defined in the response plan.
b) Isolate the endpoint from the network to halt lateral movement and C2 traffic.
c) Rebuild the endpoint from a known-good image and return it to production.
d) Patch the exploited vulnerability across the affected server fleet before restoring the host to service.
04. A security-audit report finds that former contractors retain active accounts with standing access to a sensitive cloud application, and that access is granted broadly rather than per-session. No active compromise has been detected yet.
Which policy change best translates this audit finding into a corrective action?
a) Increase log-retention on the cloud application from 30 to 90 days to support future forensic investigations and audits.
b) Deploy an XDR playbook that isolates any host these contractors log in from.
c) Add a banner warning users that access is monitored.
d) Implement least-privilege, just-in-time access with automated, lifecycle-driven deprovisioning.
05. Monitoring shows a compromised workload compressing several databases and transferring them over an encrypted channel to an external storage provider outside the organization.
Which tactic does the outbound transfer represent?
a) Command and Control
b) Exfiltration
c) Persistence
d) Collection
06. A team is deciding which parts of its incident response to hand to a SOAR playbook and which to keep as human decisions. They want automation to accelerate response without causing unacceptable business risk.
Which two activities are the most appropriate to fully automate?
(Choose two.)
a) Approving emergency firewall changes that open new inbound paths during an incident.
b) Deciding whether to notify regulators and legal counsel about a suspected data breach involving customer records.
c) Enriching an alert by automatically gathering reputation and related telemetry data.
d) Automatically reimaging any server that generates two or more medium-severity alerts.
e) Automatically revoking a session token flagged by a high-confidence detection.
07. An analyst is triaging a live intrusion. Telemetry shows an attacker has valid credentials and is actively pivoting between two workloads over an internal path. A patch for the exploited vulnerability is available but will take hours to test and deploy fleet-wide, and the compromised identity is still authenticating successfully.
What should the team do next to best limit damage?
a) Prioritize deploying the patch fleet-wide first, because fixing the root cause ends the incident.
b) Cut the internal path and disable the compromised identity now, then patch afterward.
c) Reimage both workloads immediately to return them to a known-good state.
d) Escalate the report to executives and wait for their decision before acting.
08. Two incidents arrive at once. In incident A, a workstation is confirmed running ransomware that is beginning to encrypt a file share. In incident B, telemetry shows a single failed exploit attempt against a fully patched server, with no sign of success.
How should the team apply the response lifecycle across the two incidents?
a) Reimage the workstation in incident A immediately and skip isolating it to save time.
b) Contain incident B first, because any exploit attempt against a server is more severe than a single workstation.
c) Immediately contain incident A by isolating the workstation, and treat incident B as monitoring only.
d) Hold all action on both incidents until a full report is written and approved.
09. An incident-response team wants a single console that correlates detections across endpoint, network, cloud, and email domains and then executes automated response actions from that correlated context.
Which approach best fits this requirement?
a) A SIEM
b) Cisco XDR
c) Secure Network Analytics
d) OpenTelemetry
10. A cloud security engineer needs a continuously updated inventory of cloud resources and the relationships between them — which identities can reach which resources — to answer posture questions such as over-privileged access paths.
Which tool is designed for this?
a) Secure Network Analytics
b) A SIEM
c) Secure Cloud Analytics
d) Secure Cloud Insights